Author Archive | Scott Tipton

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Some Day When We Meet Up Yonder

So I lost my dad last month. Richard Lee Tipton passed away at 7:20 p.m. on February 5, 2023. He was 88 years old. The details don’t really matter much in the end. It was a mercifully brief illness, and he was at peace and resting comfortably when the time came. I don’t want to […]

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The Artist’s Artist: Jim Aparo

When you’re a little kid, standing at the comic-book spinner rack with a dollar in your hand to choose a couple of comics, you’ve gotta get the most for your buck. This was a situation Li’l Scott was very familiar with down at the Quik Stop back in the day. Sometimes, the decision was easy, […]

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giantman

A Marvelous Debut

Even today’s casual comic-book readers are familiar with the work of painter Alex Ross. Between his yearly treasury-sized DC books with writer Paul Dini and the numerous series he’s created for Marvel and DC, not to mention the hundreds of covers, paintings and prints he’s produced, the Alex Ross style has become an easily recognized […]

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fightingnazis

Splitting the Atoms

The original Justice Society of America was a pretty formidable group. You’ve got guys like Hourman, who can throw cars around like luggage, and the Flash, whose blinding speed makes him practically untouchable. Then there are folks like Green Lantern and Dr. Fate, who possess unthinkable power at their very fingertips. As if that wasn’t […]

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Beetlemania

It looks as though the upcoming BLUE BEETLE film has managed to survive the budget slashings at the now-tumultuous Warner Brothers/Discovery Studio, so it looks like we’ll be seeing the Jaime Reyes version of Blue Beetle making its way to the big screen in some form. Personally, I’ve always been a huge Beetle fan, but […]

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Winging It, Part III

ENDANGERED SPECIES – HAWKMAN, PART III For those who came in late:In previous installments of Comics 101 , we’ve explored the origins of the 1940s Hawkman character, as well as his 1960s counterpart. When last we convened, the question was: How would Hawkman fare in the wake of DC Comics’ sweeping editorial restructuring of their […]

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Winging It, Part II

Julius Schwartz had found a formula, and he was not letting go of it. The DC Comics editor had spearheaded a revival of the publisher’s line of superhero comics, which by the mid ‘50s had dwindled to Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, with second-stringers like Aquaman and Green Arrow hanging on as backup features. Starting […]

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crossbow

Winging It

The enormous feathered wings. The bare chest with the crossed straps. The freakish-looking beaked mask. “He fights the evils of the present with the weapons of the past.” There’s no two ways about it. In its purest, most visceral form, Hawkman is just plain cool. How then did DC Comics manage to screw up this […]

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Strength in Numbers

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that comics, like everything else, don’t exist in a vacuum. Everything that comic-book readers think of as conventions, as benchmarks, even as clichés of the genre, had to appear somewhere first. Even something as basic as, say, the team-up. Before 1941, despite the fact that the newsstands were positively overflowing […]

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Welcoming the Future, Treasuring the Past.